Alastair Noble has been a Historian in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office since 2002, previously working at The National Archives, Kew. This, his second book, is based on a major revision of his PhD thesis, ‘Propaganda, Morale and Flight: Germany’s eastern provinces, summer 1944–spring 1945’, which was examined by the late Professor John Erickson, the foremost western authority on the Nazi–Soviet war.

The Darkest Hour is a groundbreaking
English-language examination of the final period of Nazi rule in
Germany’s eastern provinces at the end of the Second World
War. It outlines the wartime role of this region and assesses the
impact of Nazi ‘popular mobilisation’initiatives during
the closing months of the conflict. Major projects such as the preparation
of the Ostwall defences and the raising of the Volkssturm
(Home Guard) are examined in depth. The book concludes by weighing
up the importance of propaganda and coercion to the Nazi regime
as it attempted to prolong its existence in the face of crushing
military defeats.

The Darkest Hour incorporates a unique synthesis
of archival and printed source material from the English-speaking
world, Germany, Poland and Russia. The eastern German Nazi leadership,
their crimes and their corruption, are covered collectively to a
greater extent in this book than in any English-language account
hitherto. As the Third Reich was on the brink of defeat, its leader
and lackeys wielded life or death powers and were loathed by the
civilian population as much as the advancing Soviets were feared.

This extensive account of this important historical period
and circumstance is essential reading for all scholars and students
of the Third Reich and European military history.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Glossary
List of Illustrations
Maps

Introduction Part I A Faraway Land

Chapter 1
Come the Gauleiters, 1933–1939

Chapter 2
An Oasis of Tranquillity? The German East, 1939–1944
Chapter 3
Enjoy the War, the Peace will be Dire

Part II The War Comes Home: Eastern Germany
July 1944–January 1945

Chapter 4
A Deep Anxiety over the Fate of East Prussia

Chapter 5
A Unique, Improvised Exertion: Ostwallbau, 1944

Chapter 6
Confronting Catastrophe: The October Invasion of East Prussia
and the Launch of the Volkssturm

“A gripping and masterful account
of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Germany’s eastern
provinces during the final months of Hitler’s‘ thousand
year’ Reich. Based on impressive scholarship, it’s
a grim and harrowing read that evokes pity, horror, and awe
at the sheer scale and force of the atrocities and hardships
inflicted on millions of hapless civilians by the Nazi Party
and Soviet forces alike, and at the whirlwind of war that swept
away centuries of German settlement and forever changed the
map of central Europe. For anyone wishing to understand the
forces that shaped postwar Europe this is compulsory reading.”
David Stafford, University of Edinburgh, author of Endgame,
1945

“A very impressive piece of academic research. Dr Noble
relates in near clinical detail a story of greed, barbarism
and incompetence which should be essential reading for anyone
with an interest in modern Germany and its eastern neighbours.”
Dr Keith Hamilton, Senior Editor, Documents on British Policy
Overseas

“Alastair Noble’s
book is meticulously researched and tells the extraordinary
and harrowing story of how the Nazi regime attempted to defend
eastern Germany. It is a powerful account and deserves a wide
audience.” Professor Evan Mawdsley, University of
Glasgow

“Noble examines relations between the German public
east of the Oder river in the regions of East Prussia, eastern
Pomerania, east Brandenburg, and Silesia and local Nazi officials,
as well as the short-term fates of those who fled and/or were
expelled from these regions as Nazi Germany fell. Of particular
concern in the study are the efforts of Nazi officials to
combat public defeatism in the face of the advancing Red Army.
Nobel describes how Nazi propagandists assessed the public
mood and how they simultaneously exploited fears of Soviet
invasion in order to mobilize the public while assuring them
that their homes would not be threatened or, at least, they
would be recaptured and relief would be delivered. He also
documents the increasing readiness of the Nazis to resort
to coercion against the German public as propaganda was rendered
more and more impotent by military reality.” Reference
& Research Book News

“By mid-August 1944, any German with the slightest grasp
of military reality could discern that the end was nigh in
the east. In just two months of summer fighting, the Red Army
had swept the last remnants of the Wehrmacht from Belorussia
and eastern Poland, all but annihilating Army Group Center
in the process, and now stood poised on the frontier of the
Reich. Though NSDAP functionaries continued to preach the
time-honored faith of unconditional victory and devotion to
the genius of the Führer, the message from the pulpit of National
Socialism in these dark times increasingly emphasized an unseasoned
and decidedly baleful theme: “Strength through Fear.” Defeat
meant extermination. If the “blind destructive fury” of the
Bolshevik hordes was not checked, “no creatures would survive
in Germany, no blade of grass would grow, no insects would
live” (p. 86). All Germans in the east, soldiers and civilians
alike, must prepare for the Soviet onslaught. All must fight.
The impending battle would determine the fate of the German
race.

Fear and the exploitation of fear animate Alastair
Noble’s impressive new study. Concentrating on the pervasive
German dread of Soviet occupation and the variety of ways
in which Nazi authorities and propagandists attempted to manipulate
public anxiety to prolong the hopeless defense of the Reich,
Noble lays bare the havoc and the cruelty of the war’s last
months in eastern Germany. His geographical focus is primarily
East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and Silesia,
i.e. those eastern provinces of the Reich that had an overwhelming
German majority and that lay within Germany’s prewar borders.
His research is meticulous, based on an imposing mass of archival
sources, most notably a trove from the Ost-Dokumentation collection
in Bayreuth and an extensive range of “mood,” “behaviour,”
and activity reports compiled by and for the Sicherheitsdienst,
the Propaganda Ministry, and the Reich Ministry of Justice.
The author has seemingly left no file unopened, no document
unread.” Central European History

“The monumental suffering of German civilians during the Soviet
invasion of eastern Germany in 1944–45 has concerned regional
expellee groups, German historians and indeed national governments
at various times since World War Two. Alastair Noble builds
on a significant body of work by others scholars, but treads
new ground also, by providing a balanced, detailed and comprehensive
English-language treatment which eschews the politicized nature
of some previous studies. His sources, the pitfalls of which
he is careful to point out, consist of private accounts; official
reports from the Reich Security Service, the Propaganda Ministry,
the German Army and other agencies; and, predominantly, the
testimonies of former eastern German government officials
and other expellees, as compiled by the West German government
and Federal Archive during the 1950s and early 1960s. In addition
to its scholarly qualities, the book also benefits from a
powerful, absorbing writing style to rival even Antony Beevor.
Noble’s earlier chapters furnish the reader with important
reminders of the high pre-1933 levels of Nazi support in eastern
Germany, of the wartime suffering and death of foreign workers,
POWs and Jews in the region, and of the outrages which the
Germans inflicted in the lands of those same Red Army soldiers
who would eventually bring such calamity to Germany’s eastern
realms. Nonetheless, his primary focus is upon the increasingly
dire wartime ordeal of the eastern German population itself.
Noble is particularly concerned to highlight how that population
suffered at the hands not just of the Soviets, but of its
own leaders also. The region’s Gauleiters, most prominent
among whom was East Prussia’s Erich Koch, had risen to the
higher levels of the Nazi hierarchy through their own self-serving
ruthlessness. Once in power they remained true to form, enriching
and aggrandizing themselves by any means. Noble shows how
it was largely out of self-interest that, during the war’s
final two years, senior Party officials in eastern Germany
sought so desperately to fortify the population’s levels of
morale and endurance – in the face of increasing bombing,
wartime shortages, the social and economic strain created
by the influx of evacuees, and the approaching spectre of
the Red Army.
…Noble really hits his stride during the months following
the destruction of Army Group Centre in summer 1944, a catastrophe
which brought the Red Army to the borders of Germany itself.
In these perilous circumstances, eastern Germans greeted news
of the July 1944 attempt upon Hitler’s life with particular
consternation. But the endeavours of regional Nazi officials
to rally the population proved forlorn, and further exposed
the regime’s bankruptcy. The building of the much-vaunted
Ostwall produced a pale, under-fortified imitation of the
Westwall, drained the region’s agricultural economy of important
labour, and subjected the German workers who laboured on it
to squalid, degrading conditions. Meanwhile Germany’s final,
desperate manpower levy, the Volkssturm, not only proved useless
militarily, but also drew the region’s remaining men-folk
away from their families; this would contribute to the dreadful
chaos once the refugee masses eventually sought to flee westward.
For eastern Germany’s senior Party officials, as Noble makes
clear, all this was beside the point; preserving their own
necks by compelling the population to struggle to the end
was their primary concern. Among the results of this effort
were numerous attempts by Gauleiters both to interfere with
sensible military decision-making by Wehrmacht commanders
on the spot, and to hinder early attempts at orderly, pre-emptive
civilian evacuation. Their efforts would greatly exacerbate
the scale of the disaster that befell eastern Germany during
the war’s final months.
…Covering the Soviet invasion of eastern Germany proper
from January 1945, Noble details the disorderly refugee rout
and the mass death of women and children by the roadsides,
together with the killing and savagery which Red Army soldiers
unleashed, whether at the behest of their commanders or through
their own brutalized state. It is testimony to the power of
his writing that these particular passages are often genuinely
difficult to read. At the same time, Noble admirably succeeds
where some historians have failed by avoiding both the Scylla
of being seen to place Soviet atrocities in eastern Germany
on an equal footing with Nazi crimes, and the Charybdis of
being seen to legitimize such Soviet atrocities as brutal
but understandable vengeance for the outrages perpetrated
by the Germans in the Soviet Union.
That much of the eastern German population’s suffering was
made needlessly unavoidable by the crass, self-serving actions
of Nazi apparatchiks is a running theme throughout the book.
Nevertheless, it is not only the Party, but the Wehrmacht
also, which comes in for harsh criticism. For instance, Noble
demonstrates as fallacious the claim that the Wehrmacht continued
fighting in the east purely so as to hold open corridors to
the west for floods of refugees; on the contrary, army units
and their commanders frequently took action that was severely
detrimental to those refugees, and wild plunder by German
troops was widespread. This excellent book, scholarly and
compellingly written, is thoroughly deserving of a wide readership.”
European History Quarterly

Publication Details

Hardback ISBN:

978-1-84519-285-3

Paperback ISBN:

978-1-84519-286-0 (Dec. 2009)

Page Extent / Format:

360 pp. / 246 x 171 mm

Release Date:

November 2008

Illustrated:

Maps and Photos

Hardback Price:

£65.00 / $95.00

Paperback Price:

£29.95 / $49.95 (December
2009)

Order Item

This book can be ordered online or by telephone.

For the UK, Europe and Rest of the World:
Gazelle Book Services

tel. 44 (0)1524-528500

For the United States, Canada, South America and Asia:
Independent Publishers Group of Chicago